Measuring the Effects of Voter Confidence on Political Participation: An Application to the 2006 Mexican Election

Working Paper No.: 75Date Published: 2009-06-01

Author(s):

Inés Levin, California Institute of Technology

R. Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology

Abstract:

In this paper we study the causal effect of voter confidence on participation decisions in the 2006
Mexican Election. Previous research has shown that voter confidence was a relevant factor in
explaining participation during the years of the PRI hegemony. An open question is whether this
relationship is still significant after the democratic transition taking place in the years 1997-2000.
Moreover, in the previous literature, this problem was studied in a regression framework. In this
article we argue that, since voter confidence and participation decisions are affected by similar
covariates, a regression approach may lead to results which are too model dependent, and do not
account for the heterogeneity of effects across voters. To solve this problem, we use matching
methods, and find that voter confidence has considerable effects on participation decisions, but
substantially different in magnitude from those found using the usual regression approach.